


The Altruism of Violence

by skydork (klismaphilia)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad Parenting, Childhood Friends, Crimes & Criminals, Drug Addiction, F/M, Gen, High School, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Interviews, M/M, Multi, Murder, Past Child Abuse, Revenge killing, School Shootings, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 12:59:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10101833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klismaphilia/pseuds/skydork
Summary: The perpetrator (as Phasma supposes the resting figure in the chair to be) sits before a metal desk, his hands primly folded atop the counter, porcelain skin coated with layer upon layer of dried blood. Red-gold hair shrouds his face like a halo, a stiff pink shirt buttoned up to his throat, long sleeves stained beyond repair and torn through. Soft lips purse in frustration, and he stands in seconds, leveling the Captain with a bemused glare. His khaki trousers are riddled with holes, no longer worn in the same prim press he’d always wanted them kept before; strangely enough, the spatters of red staining his freckled cheeks fit him in a manner nothing else ever has.“Armitage,” she murmurs, and holds a hand up, slowly, as if to pause the young man. “Are you…” Phasma’s voice catches in her throat, stiff. “Alright?”“I’ve never been better."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just a friendly reminder to read all the tags added at the beginning of each chapter, including this one :) I don't want to squick anyone unintentionally.

**1.**

_requital [rəˈkwīdl], verb._

_make appropriate return for (a favor, service, or wrongdoing)._

_synonyms: avenge, take reprisals for, exact justice for, get even for.  
_

 

At approximately 6:00 on a dreary Thursday morning, Captain Avery Phasma of the Central Falls Police Department walks into the station, a cup of coffee tight in one hand, her badge pinned haphazardly on the right breast pocket of her uniform. She knows before she enters the building that something is horribly amiss.

The first solid indicator is Officer Reiss, slumped over just inside a doorway, his white shirt soaked in scarlet drops of seeping blood. He’s cool enough, and yet without the stonelike rigidity of a withering corpse, that Phasma knows the body has been lying here post-mortem for a few hours at most-- there’s no pulse, of course, when she leans down to press two fingers along the hollow of his throat. The wound is a rather spacious presence across his torso, bullets still deeply embedded in his chest cavity.

Two other bodies line the floor-- further out of the way, one dropped behind his desk and the other fell outside of the interrogation room. Phasma nudges the latter aside with a stiff, black boot, lips curling in disgust. As she raises her head, her eyes catch the glint of fluorescent light flickering in the backdrop of a cracked doorway.

She doesn’t have to pull her firearm. The perpetrator (as she supposes the resting figure in the chair to be) sits before a metal desk, his hands primly folded atop the counter, porcelain skin coated with layer upon layer of dried blood. Red-gold hair shrouds his face like a halo, a stiff pink shirt buttoned up to his throat, long sleeves stained beyond repair and torn through. Soft lips purse in frustration, and he stands in seconds, leveling the Captain with a bemused glare. His khaki trousers are riddled with holes, no longer worn in the same prim press he’d always wanted them kept before; strangely enough, the spatters of red staining his freckled cheeks fit him in a manner nothing else ever has.

“Armitage,” she murmurs, and holds a hand up, slowly, as if to pause the young man. “Are you…” Phasma’s voice catches in her throat, stiff. “Alright?”

“I’ve never been better,” the nineteen year old answers. He brushes away the messy hair obscuring his eyes with nimble fingers, not bothering to look up at her.

“Where’s Ben?”

“You won’t find him now,” Armitage echoes. “He’s long gone. Past the reach of you scoundrels.” He drops, like a stone, back into the chair, legs splayed and one foot resting against the bolted down leg. Skinny arms cross defiantly over his chest, a defensive gesture often assumed by his mother. It seems the boy adopted the habit.

Phasma sits across from him, unquestioning, until Armitage deigns to meet her eyes. His gaze is dreadful, edged with vitriol and a loathing so deep rooted that even _murder_ couldn’t truly purge his enmity. Yet, somehow, it evens out when he sees her; his brow edges towards normalcy, the curve of his lower lip twitching.

“I liked you the most,” he admits. “Aside from Rae, that is. But she-- she told me you were decent. That you’d understand.”

Phasma nods, then, extending a hand, leans in across the table. “I need to know what happened.”

“It’s a long story. How much time do you have?”

“That depends on how many people are dead.”

“Thirteen,” Armitage whispers. The hollow tune of his voice carries for a second in the silence, a taciturn gift floating away from him, his lashes fluttering as he steadies himself against the desk. “All of them deserving of it, you understand.”

“Then I have time,” Phasma says. “I have time for as long as you do.”

 

* * *

 

**[Central Falls P.D. Log: Interview. Hux, Armitage. Interrogator: Phasma, Captain Avery G. Time: 6:49 AM.]**

_“To understand this story, I have to start at the beginning. It’s a long story, perhaps… nine years of material. Will that be a problem, Captain?”_

_“No. I think a story like this needs context-- perspective.”_

_“Then you’re intelligent. More than the rest of your officers. Where should I begin?”_

_“Ben. Tell me about Ben.”_

_“Ben… Ben was hard to describe. He’s the type of person you can spend years trying to piece together and still not fully understand; most people knew Ben as the crazy kid with the drugged-out father, the kid who wanted to shoot up a high school for ‘fun.’ Fun, they said-- nothing about Ben’s life was fun, I’ll tell you that. But neither is anyone’s in this godforsaken cesspool of a town. People called Ben crazy, and they called me revolting. Maybe they were right, on some level._

_“But that’s not the Ben I knew. I met Ben Solo when I was nine years old-- he was small then, a good deal smaller than me, not that you’d believe it. We went to the same elementary school. Ms. Kellis--rather, Maratelle- was handing out papers. Mine was disfigured. All sorts of bright red marks, up and down the page. Insults--_ worthless, trash, impossible to understand. Disgusting handwriting. What have your parents been teaching you? _It’s a true irony, when you realize that whore was fucking my father for years, Captain._ Years, _after he abandoned me and Mum, left her to raise me without so much as a penny toward child support-- but I’m getting ahead of myself. That comes later._

 _“I was trying not to cry, you know. Staring at that paper and wondering what I’d done wrong; I did everything wrong, really, but those comments didn’t make sense and I was too scared to ask. I’d just made the effort to raise my hand when the door cracked open. And in walks this_ kid. _Scuffed up boots and a rumpled t-shirt, not even wearing a jacket. His backpack was pulled closed well enough, but it seemed overly large. And the kid himself looked like he’d seen a ghost-- I thought he was going to cry, but instead he glances up to Maratelle and just says, “I’m Ben,” and then walks over to sit next to me._

 _“Ben wasn’t from the same area I grew up in. Central Falls is pretty awful all around, but he grew up on the outskirts; the woods-area, where all the poor kids liked to build their forts. I was from the ‘rich’ side of town-- I didn’t think it wise to set foot over there, and I didn’t have any reason to. Not anywhere, really. I didn’t have any friends. They all called me a priss, a narc. Maybe I was; I don’t know. Ben was my only friend, and he just stuck his hand out and tapped me on the shoulder and said,_ ‘so what are we studying?’ _People stared at him like he had the plague, partially because he was_ strange, _and I was, too._

_“Out on the playground that day, I think I caught him watching me, but he was more preoccupied with Rey. Rey was his cousin, and Ben worried about her more than anything. I suppose it’s one of the reasons he couldn’t go through with the shooting, in the end; he still had something to lose. I watched them for awhile, but Ben just spent time with Rey, drawing on the cement in multicolored chalk._

_“It wasn’t until a few days later that we officially became friends…”_

 

* * *

 

A red-haired boy lingered at the edge of the small playground set out behind Central Falls elementary, tucked in beneath the shadow of one cold, brick wall. His fingers were curled tightly around a long stick, smooth to the touch and tapered at one end; _good for prodding_ , Armitage considered. He’d crouched down on one knee beside the small body of a ice-winged dead bird; the bloody mess of torn feathers, its missing eye, severed leg.

He pressed, then, with the stick, until the bird gave a sad twitch. _Twitch,_ and the blood began pouring like a river out of the opened wound across its back. Armitage didn’t know how to pull away, like this, when it was so clear and so _gruesome,_ just a mess of blood and feathers and _sorrow._

It reminded him, in some way, of his own skin, the tears left across his too-thin torso by the scrape of Brendol’s ring, the blistered, red burns laid over his side. They matched too well with Mum’s, so he didn’t mind, even though Mum told him that it was a bad thing. But then, there were so many _bad_ things that Armitage couldn’t count them all; even trying to consolidate them in lists proved impossible. Perhaps there was some sort of rule on what made an action particularly _bad--_ or perhaps it was only his father.

Brendol had been gone two years, anyway, so it shouldn’t matter; he was happier, and Mum seemed it too, at least when she was lucid enough to talk to him about it. She spent so much time laid up in bed, and even when Armitage tried to nestle under the covers with her it was more a signal for a needed _sleep_ than a cue for interaction.

A hand brushed against Armitage’s shoulder, soft, yet still startling. The boy jumped, stick clattering to the ground when he spun around to see--

Ben. The same messy appearance, face smudged with dirt. No longer carrying an oversized bookbag, but instead clutching to a few pencils in one hand as he glanced up to Armitage with dark, expressive eyes.

“What’re you looking at?” The younger boy asked, curious.

“Nothing, I-- it’s just a bird.”

“Is it dead?”

Armitage faltered, a soft grin still held over his lips. “Yes.”

“Sweet,” Ben said, in the same awed voice children used whenever they were allowed to see something out of the ordinary. He stepped closer, reaching down to grab the abandoned stick, looking it over with a raised brow.

“This is a good one.”

“The _best,”_ Armitage affirmed, reaching for it. His fingers brushed Ben’s slightly, and the ginger almost visibly recoiled, in pause as he waited for Ben to make another move. When no action was taken, no words passed, he swallowed. “I’m Armie.”

Ben smiled, nodding. “I know. You sit next to me in homeroom.”

“Ah.”

“I could show you some other cool things, if you want.” Ben grasped to one of Armitage’s sleeves, a pale green that stuck close to his skin, accentuating the slightness of his body.

“W-why?” Armitage barely had the voice to stammer.

“Because you’re _different.”_ Ben said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “And I like you. I want to be your friend.”

“B-but I don’t… have any friends?”

“I know.” The answer was resolute. “Neither do I. At least not yet.”

 

* * *

 

_“Ben’s house was in the bad part of town, the shady area; his father still smuggled drugs when he took up residence in Central Falls, right out of the back room of Ben’s house. Han was always doing shit like that-- he was utterly reprehensible. But Ben liked him, at least when he was a kid. Han didn’t really have any expectations for him the way Leia did… made it worse later. The falling out was difficult for him._

_“The first time I went to Ben’s place, I got cornered by a few jack-offs from school. People who I’d always hated, though I never considered them so despicable until later on. When I was young they just laughed at me: my clothes, my hair, my things. They ripped everything I was carrying from my bag-- I had a pandora’s box. And… a booklet of crossword puzzles and sudoku questions. I’d filled most of them in, I remember, and they had the indecency to just toss it in the mud… really goes to show how much the kids here value education. Only slightly_ more _than the principals and teachers, I’d assume._

_“I was so angry. I don’t think I’d ever been so angry before, not even when Brendol called me names, or when Maratelle degraded me in front of the other students. Those were more terrifying, when I was young, because I always was scared to get in trouble-- to be hurt, to be abandoned. Mum was the only one who hadn’t left, and then Ben. And fuck, Ben meant so much._

_“I stood there looking for a good while… the ringleader looked at me and he walked right up and grabbed my face, started mocking me._

“What’s a prissy little thing like you doing here? Did’ja come to see that freak who just moved in on the corner block?”

“Don’tcha know the stories? This side of town is _dangerous._ And you’re on our path now, so there’s no point in tryin’ to run. Nobody wants anything from your skinny, pasty ass anyway!”

 _“I didn’t think it best to argue; I’d been stumbling back to my bike when they tossed my things, but I could hear my heart pounding in my chest, louder and louder and… it was_ awful. _I thought I was going to wet myself at the time, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything else if I had-- too scared. The weak little bastard, son of a whore-- they said that. I’d always heard it, but never directly. And I…”_

 

* * *

 

Armitage’s hand brushed against the handle of the bike, clammy palms so tense against the rubber he thought it might impale his flesh. The older boy leaned in, and he _reeked_ of booze, which Hux had always hated. Brendol used to bring home copious amounts of the stuff, spend nights getting drunk as he worked and locked himself in his study till midnight.

He hated it, hated the _smell_ of it, vile and disgusting. He couldn’t even reconcile this boy from memory, tried to keep his head down so as not to make it worse, but the kid’s eyes _gleamed_ with an unadulterated enmity and Armitage nearly cried out as a hand found one of his bony wrists, jerked on it so hard he pitched forward.

_“Stop!”_

The next thing he knew he was being grabbed by a pair of gentle arms-- soft, not intent on bruising him or picking him apart the way this boy had been-- and he was leaning over the bully, watching him prop himself up from where he’d fallen on the ground, wiping the spit-- _Armitage’s_ spit-- from his eyes.

_I-- how did I--?_

“C’mon!” Ben yelled, tugging on Armie’s thin shoulders once more until the older boy finally spun about and allowed himself to be dragged away. Ben ran quickly, diving back under the shade of a tree, yanking Armitage through the underbrush of the woods around him until they were back in an open space, could see the bright sky and the main road off in the distance.

“Where are we going?”

“My secret hideout!” Ben hissed, his voice low enough to escape notice even if a bit jarring. “Nobody’s gonna find us out there. Snoke helped me set it up!”

 _“Father_ Snoke?” Armitage gasped, winded, and Ben leaned back against a tree to catch his breath. He nodded, after, processing the question and licking his lips.

“Yeah, I’m in his bible study. He’s real helpful, teaches me a bunch of cool stuff that Mom doesn’t really like. But he’s nice. I have friends, at church.” He paused, pointed ahead with one hand. “Hideout’s up there. It’s all mine, and it’s _awesome_ so don’t knock anything over.”

“Ah-- yeah!” Armitage nodded, and his hand immediately tugged on the scarf around his neck out of habit; a soothing gesture, knowing that his mother had knitted the item by hand. His chest heaved, suddenly too tight, incapable of drawing another breath. When he felt a sudden touch on his wrist, dragging him out from the underbrush, his foot caught on a sharp branch, a startled wheeze of breath sounding as he yelped. “Ben, I- I can’t… I can’t run anymore.”

Ben glanced him over. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s-- my health. I’m tired…”

“Is that why you never play ball with us at lunch?” The younger boy appeared to falter, his brow twinging with a genuine sense of concern as he stopped entirely, observing Armie’s ghastly face, his shaking hands. He stepped closer, blinked-- reached down, as though in slow motion, and wrapped one of his own freezing hands tight across Armitage’s, still covered by a stiff black glove that had done nothing to preserve his body heat.

Armitage nodded, stepping back again. “I-it’s alright.”

Ben frowned, clearly frustrated at the sudden development. He gritted his teeth, balled one hand into a fist. As if hit by a sudden wave of determination, he squeezed the ginger’s hand tighter. “I’ll carry you!”

“What? Ben, I--”

“I can do it. I’ve got-- I’m strong. Just let me get around you. It’ll be good! Promise I won’t drop you.”

 

* * *

 

 _“He did, though.”_ Armitage’s voice catches, in a manner Phasma almost wishes to call melancholic. He glances to the camera, bites his lip between clear white teeth, turns his head away once more. _“I was lucky I didn’t need stitches, the bloody idiot. But I suppose it was admirable, for him, in his own way-- that was the day we became friends, Captain. When Ben nearly cracked my head open by dropping me on a footbridge.”_

_“Were you often sick as a child?”_

_“Oh yes. Quite often, from what I remember-- coughing, wheezing, a stuffy nose, a sore throat. Joint problems, and I’d always been prone to catching even the slightest bug.”_

_“Did your illnesses affect your performance at school?”_

_“I suppose that would be one way of putting it. Though it particularly seemed to have an effect on proving my weakness- being sick all the time is what told my father I was useless, and it told my peers I was an easy target. ‘Target,’ of course, is an ironic way of putting it… but it wasn’t hard for the others to gang up on me. Ben didn’t help me out, normally, though I didn’t really expect him to.”_

_“You mentioned, when Ben was in the hospital, that Ben also faced a lot of problems with harassment. Could you elaborate on that?”_

Hux sighs, irately nodding in affirmation. _“I can. Ben tended to be… how should I put it… erratic. His moods were very irregular, and he was prone to impulsivity; he used to steal things during class, snacks or pencils or whatever he’d gotten an eye for. It was a tick more than anything, I believe, but it did get him into a bit of trouble with Maratelle. Not that she’d liked him in the first place-- he was friends with_ me, _after all._

_“But Ben wasn’t known for his emotional problems until far later. Originally, he was bullied for being a goody-two-shoes, believe it or not. Ben was a choir boy, literally, I mean; he attended the church services every Sunday despite Han’s evident lack of faith. I have to say I sided with Han. I’ve never believed in a higher power and science itself defies the very idea of a ‘God’. But it gave Ben a hobby, so I didn’t care. And he liked spending time with Father Snoke._

_“I’d always found Father Snoke offputting. Creepy, even, as I would’ve said when I was younger: he was always too friendly toward me, whether it was offering me support once my father left or telling me I could ‘sit with him and pray’ if I ever changed my mind about attending services. I think I mostly found him strange because his smile was fake. I thought anyone could tell… I guess I was wrong, in the end, because Ben couldn’t. Ben took everything at face value; he was ignorant to that kind of thing, like most kids._

_“Which brings me to the first life-changing event. Do you remember Finn Hadrian?”_

_“How wouldn’t I?”_ Phasma answered, bluntly, recalling. _“He was in the same class as Ben’s cousin, wasn’t he?”_

_“Yes. Yes, he was. And he was only five when-- when the incident happened. With Gallius Rax. I know everyone said he went mad because his wife had been cheating-- the story was that he stabbed her with a butcher’s knife. Twenty times in the chest; not a surprise if you consider what he did to his children.”_

_“That house was something from a horror movie,”_ Phasma muses, her own memories of the scene all too vivid. Gallius Rax was a foster parent, removed enough from the main vestiges of town that his actions hadn’t been widely known until after he’d slaughtered his wife. They’d found the children after; only three of them were still in decent enough condition to be treated successfully at the hospital.

The fourth hadn’t been quite as lucky.

He was the same age as Finn had been, but too-thin and overly pale, just as Armitage appeared now. Except Slip was much younger and much less cared for-- he’d been confined to a hospital bed for a few weeks following the incident, until they’d inevitably had to pull him off life support.

And Finn had been there through it all. A tiny child with dark skin and a blue blanket slung over his shoulders like a cape, sitting vigilant at the edge of Slip’s bed night after night. He’d talked to all the officers, cried before them even when they tried to avoid giving him a straight answer. It didn’t take a genius to tell that he’d known from the first night.

Slip was going to die.

Finn hadn’t gone back to school for a couple of months, and his other foster siblings, nicknamed Zero and Nines respectively, had been made to drop out altogether. But the incident had scarred all of them, in at least some way, and when Finn returned, his eyes were always unfocused, his posture guarded and distant. He’d hardly seemed a child, overwhelmed as he was with melancholy; Phasma had only been close to graduating herself, then. But the mistreatment documented by the officers over Rax’s governing of his family was the case that made her decide to become a police officer in the first place-- so she could uphold the law and correct the injustices of this decrepit community.

 _“It reminded me of Brendol,”_ Armitage confesses, gazing up at her hopelessly. _“But even worse, it shook the whole town to its core and nothing was done. Nothing was_ ever _fucking done, and nothing was done for Finn either, when it came to the school. Principal Tarkin turned a blind eye to anything he didn’t want to deal with; I suppose he thought it was a good thing, only looking after himself. But it fucked us all over-- just like this goddamn town!_

 _“But what fucked me up the most was that my dad… he was_ friends _with Rax, you know? And Finn got beat like Brendol beat me-- yet neither of them,_ grown men, _ever got prosecuted, ever got punished for anything they did. And yes, I include my father in that-- he abandoned me, me and mum, called her a disgusting whore, let it be widely known that I was nothing more than his useless bastard. He up and left with Maratelle-- fuck, they’d already been_ married, _Phasma. That’s why he never married my mother, he already had his wife somewhere._

_“And then my mum got sick. She just kept getting sicker, and-- and so did I, but I never said anything. I came home from school and went upstairs and she’d just send me off to my room. She was so… awful looking, like she’d been possessed by some creature, drained of her spirit. Her hands shook whenever she tried to write. She spent half her time in bed with the lights off, always with a bottle of liquor and a cocktail of pills at her bedside._

_“My mum had Parkinson’s, and she’d gotten it early, so she had a lot of medications. Prescription, yes, but she didn’t use them like she was supposed to -- she took too many, tried to shove the pain away, allow herself some reprieve from life, if only for a little while. I didn’t think much of it. That was the way it had always been._

_“One night I was out with Ben. It was really late, but we’d gone out to our secret place anyway. Even managed to start a fire. Ben snagged Han’s lighter, kept showing off how cool it was to me. We brought blankets, and we huddled together inside the shack by that overgrown field, watched cars pass on the main street in the distance. He brought toys, games, tried to get me to do ridiculous things, like walk on a half toppled beam, climb trees… I never did. I had my books, which was what I wanted._

_“But that night was different-- it was the night that everything first began to change.”_

 

* * *

  

Ben was resting, at long last, his hand still inside the opened bag of marshmallows, the glare of firelight reflecting from before them against the odd necklace left on his chest. He shifted impatiently, head leaned against Armitage’s stiff shoulder, spit escaping his mouth and dampening Armie’s white shirt.

The older boy hadn’t minded at the time; he ruffled Ben’s hair, brow furrowed in a tight line as the pencil held in his hand defied his grasp. The lines of the sudoku puzzle were blurring before him, an unmistakable nausea swarming Armitage’s gut. He chalked it up to the weakness of his frail body, his underdeveloped immune system. Ben was so lucky to have a normal body; he’d even begun to put on a decent amount of _muscle_ in the past year, at least for an eleven year old.

Armitage moaned in annoyance as Ben’s head drooped, slid into the perimeter of his forearm, knocking the unsteady pencil from his fingers for good. He tucked the blanket up to his chest, wanting desperately to move. Let Ben sleep on the ground; he’d been the one to pull Armitage out here like this in the first place. If they ended up being murdered by some madman it would be Ben’s fault.

How ridiculous that this was his best chance to gather his thoughts-- how _irritating_ it was that he didn’t want to part from Ben, even as the younger boy nuzzled and pinned him and drooled all over Armitage’s clothes in his sleep.

He thumbed over Ben’s brow, drew a solid line with his fingers, lips upturned in an unfamiliar sort of smile. Honest, perhaps even _sweet_ to an onlooker… it felt so _weird_ to be there, fixed on Armitage’s face like his brain had been overtaken by an alien life form.

He didn’t want that moment to end-- had never wanted it to end.

But it had, as all things inevitably did.

**…**

Armitage returned home early the next morning, his clothing sleep-rumpled, overshirt discarded in favor of the soft white tee-shirt underneath. He’d tossed his backpack off somewhere near the couch, tumbling onto it soon after with a tone of sleepiness hardly ever shown with his frequent bouts of insomnia.

The house seemed conspicuously quiet, but Armitage hadn’t thought much of it-- he’d shrugged it off, then, though the nagging itch at the back of his mind never relented. A fear, so obvious and sudden, stuck through him in everything he did… the fear that his mother had left, now, for good.

The fear that she wouldn’t be coming back.

And when Armitage managed to stumble his way into the bathroom, he’d understood why the fear had come to be.

There, lying prostrate in the tub with tightly-shuttered eyelids and pale as a wraith, lay his mother. Her hair was a tangled mess along her shoulders, wrists only half submerged in murky bathwater and leaking trails of blood out into the disgusting coloration. Armitage didn’t have the voice to speak, the words to scream; he looked at her, sorrowful, for minutes… hours. _Hours_ crouching down beside that tub, and yet still nothing had-- she wasn’t--

She was still _breathing._ Still breathing, she hadn’t lost that much blood, and he’d been holding her the whole time, sobbing in the way Brendol had always mocked him for as though it could do something so wholeheartedly impossible as bring her back. Armitage curled in on himself, beside the tub, rocked back on his knees-- the room felt warm, here, warmer than anywhere he’d been all year, and his cheeks felt flushed, too hot.

He sat until he heard a noise.

And then there were the police, and they were moving him, one hand around his back and ushering him to his feet, only to tangle arms around his skinny waist and pull him up from the floor when he refused to move. An ambulance had brought in a stretcher-- unattractive, a sickly shade of green-- and hoisted her up to carry her away, and she _wasn’t dead,_ Armitage knew she wasn’t because she couldn’t be, everything just felt…

 _Strange._ Silent. Dull.

He’d sat at her bedside, afterwards, for a number of hours. The woman who had carried him from the house returned; messy, dark brown hair and skin like rich chocolate, offering him as sympathetic a smile as she seemed capable of.

Armitage couldn’t explain why he felt inexplicably comfortable with her.

“Your name is Armitage… right?”

“Yes,” the boy responded, his voice small and withdrawn, eyes shutting momentarily to stifle the emotion threatening to return. “Sorry, I-- something in my eye. Thank you for…” he eyed the bed. “For taking my mum here.”

The woman took a seat beside him, awkwardly placing a hand over his still-shaking shoulder, gently rubbing along the tense muscle.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she began. “Your mother needs some help right now, Armitage. These people are going to take care of her.”

“I know.” He swallowed. “I’m… I’m nervous, ma’am.”

“I know.” Her arm slid around his shoulders, tucking the small boy against a sturdy, uniformed figure in an awkward facsimile of a hug. “We’ll sort this out.”

 

* * *

 

_“You know what happened then, I’m sure. Sloane must’ve told you… about my father. What he did. She- she took me in for awhile, just until Mum recovered. I know it sounds horrible to say, but some of my happiest moments were spent in this police station. Rae Sloane wasn’t particularly a welcoming or compassionate woman, but she was the most dedicated person I’d ever met. I like to believe it was the fortitude she took to everything with that inspired me._

_“But she had to be stern, occasionally. One of the things she was stern about was Ben, particularly-- I, um. She knew before I did, I think. That I was in love with him, but-- Rae didn’t believe in love, really. She called it whimsical. I realize now it was because she’d been betrayed before, by… someone I also hated. Someone who is now dead, their name on that list of victims over there,”_ Hux nods to the white paper lain on the corner-edge of the table.

_“Would you be able to elaborate on the relationship you had with your father, Armitage?”_

_“Not at this time, no.”_

_“And what about Admiral Sloane?”_

_“I would say she’s the closest thing I had to a parental figure. She helped me to understand, Captain-- understand many things my mind wasn’t able to fathom at the time. But I owe her a lot, I really do…”_

_“For taking you in at that time or for her support afterward?”_

_“For all of it. After all, she’s the one who convinced me to fight for what I wanted-- at any cost, Captain. I’m proud of what I did, you see? I’m_ happy _that I’m in here right now, sitting across from you, detained-- because it means that Ben’s out there, still alive, and he’s far away from here. You won’t be able to catch him… though why should you? It’s not like he did anything, in the end. All of this was_ me. _I’m the one who went on a murder spree.”_

_“You’re not going to deny anything?”_

_“What’s the point? I haven’t got anything left out there, Phasma. You know that.”_

_“I know there’s more to the story than you want to admit.”_

_“Ah, well. There’s a lot that happened. To recount it all might take days, weeks… I’m not sure I’d even be allowed to tell the full story.”_

_“Like I said before, Armitage: I have time.”_

**[Central Falls P.D. Log: Interview. Hux, Armitage. Interrogator, Phasma, Captain Avery G. Time: 10:58 AM. End Interview.]**

**Author's Note:**

> I've been building this AU in my head for awhile, but it's been a long time in coming... so anyone who is interested, welcome to another clusterfuck of an AU by yours truly! Any comments or kudos mean the world to me. This is going to enter some pretty squicky territory down the road, but I'll be giving warnings at the beginning of each chapter after this. For those of you who stick around, I greatly appreciate it!
> 
> As for my updating schedule, the final chapters of Blood Void should be up next, followed by a lengthy oneshot, before I return to this fic. Closing up WIPs is always the best feeling xD


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